Enterprise and Service Provider Network, Datacenter, Cloud systems have a fundamental need to provide fast, reliable, efficient and/or fair (or unfair, e.g., tiered) network services to their customers, subscribers, users. Typically, these services must meet or exceed an agreed upon level of service quality, often explicitly defined in a Service Level Agreement (SLA). The provider is also often required to prove that the service is meeting the terms of the SLA and this proof is often reported as Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). SLAs and KPIs typically include, but are not limited to, connectivity, delay, jitter, throughput, uptime (reliability), mean time to repair (MTTR) and Mean Opinion Score (MOS).
To date, network service providers and datacenter providers have deployed a large number of monitoring equipment, software and conduct manual and automated network audits in order to measure KPIs to show conformance to the SLAs. These systems must be properly timed in order to provide accurate KPIs. Further, networks are increasingly becoming autonomously and continuously optimized wherein the network KPIs and associated performance metrics are used as an input to a closed-loop feedback system. It is absolutely essential that these metrics are accurate. This requires accurate time for accurate timestamps.
Today, systems are become more and more virtualized, i.e., running as self-contained processes “virtual machines” on top of a hypervisor, or as “containers.” These virtualized systems are increasingly instantiated and controlled dynamically, i.e., “orchestrated”. The network itself may include virtual network functions (VNF). A VNF may provide a specific network service, such as firewall or load balancer, and these individual VNF can be arranged in a series known as a “service chain”. The topology, configuration and policy may be dynamically orchestrated in a software defined network (SDN).
Alternative time distribution techniques, e.g., Network Time Protocol (NTP), Simple NTP (SNTP), and Precision Time Protocol (PTP), can not scale as networks become virtualized, and dynamically orchestrated. Therefore, there is a need to provide a scalable system for maintaining accurate timestamps among the multiplicity of network devices that may include devices, subsystems of devices, and virtual devices in order to calculate the Key Performance Indicators during the real-time operation of the network.